It’s like an iPad, but has to be plugged into the wall all the time. Rarely has a touch screen, so the only way to make it do stuff is with an external mouse and keyboard. Super useless.

I haven’t looked closely enough to know, but I recall medical image analytics being “better than human” well before the current AI/LLM rage. Like, those systems use machine learning, but in a more deterministic, more conventional algorithm sense. I think they are also less worried about false positives, because the algorithm is always assumed to be checked by a human physician, so my impression is that the real sense in which medical image analysis is ‘better’ is that it identifies smaller or more obscure defects that a human quickly scanning the image might overlook.

If you’re using a public mushroom identification AI as the only source for life-and-death choice, then false positives are a much bigger problem.

Normal eggs are $4/doz for me, too. I see that box labeled ‘cage-free’ with ‘organic’ & ‘pasture raised’ nearby. Those are super bougie eggs, and I think they’re around $10/doz where I shop (and have been for years).

In US metros, they’re typically around 2% of the home value, with discount maybe 50% for owner’s primary residence. Depending on the locality, the home value may be reappraised every year only only after a sale. If you bought a $100k house, planning retirement on $1000 annual taxes, and the area gentrifies your house to $500k, the extra $4k/year in taxes can be a budget buster.

The usual math goes something like

Annuity: $2B paid monthly over 30 years is $5.5M/month; $3.5M after taxes.

Lump sum: $1B, $670M after taxes. Invested in index fund at, say 8%, can be expected to earn $4.5M/month, $3.6M after more taxes, which are lower for capital gains & dividends.

There’s more complicated maths, if you want to model taxes, future values, and variable market returns, but they all say pretty much the same thing. They have to: the annuity works because They put the lump sum into escrow, pay a trustee to manage it well enough to pay the annuity and pay the trustee’s salary. That means the trustee will invest said lump sum (before taxes) in low-risk, low-return assets, take his vig, and pay out the annuity from what’s left.

They probably do not get the same tax cuts: a “normal” person, making a paltry $250,000/year only reduces taxes by 24% of their giving, where the ultra-rich get 37%.

But the real difference is scale. A million people each giving $100 to their favorite charity is going to distribute that money more-or-less according to the community’s overall priorities. One person giving $100M to their favorite charity has no connection to the broader community and social goals. They supercharge that one thing, which takes attention and resources from everything else.

4 - High-end philanthropy is subsidized by regular taxpayers.

I feel like this is really under-appreciated. Like, Rich Dude decides he wants to donate $100M to…whatever - early childhood education. In the US, he avoids up to $37M taxes, which you can either look at as other taxpayers making $37M matching donation or $37M taken from other society objectives.

To the extent that government is a (marginally) publicly accountable system for funding a society’s competing goals - education, health, defense, research - charity allows the very wealthy not just to bypass the social structure for prioritizing goals, but to force other taxpayers to adopt their personal priorities. Maybe the goal is good, maybe it’s not - the point is that they’re completely unaccountable.

I’m not sure that one 69-year-old wall puncher really counts as ‘going up,’ but bones that old get pretty brittle.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of people in this thread who learned about the secret service from Hollywood. They rely a lot on local law enforcement, especially for former-POTUS and for unelected candidates.

I assume they thought they had visual coverage of the rooftop from the position they used to kill the shooter, and just didn’t see him in time. Fuckup, but hardly monumental or inexcusable.

Spiteful comedy feels good as long as it punches up. Not necessarily funny, but schadenfreude, cathartic, or just relief seeing them ‘get taken down a peg.’ It invites controversy when the artist and the audience disagree on the power structure. Chappellle falls apart around transgender, because he thinks he’s punching up to that group, where I imagine most people believe that trans are close to the bottom of the oppression spectrum. Chappelle’s argument basically being something like, “Well, they can ‘pass’ if they just match gender presentation to biological sex, and a lot of them are white.,” but having to hide your membership in a group is the opposite of power.

Add a little caffeine! People love it.

Quaint rhyme from better times. Boss is making $34 for my dime today.

You can do a lot with a hand saw, chisel, mallet, utility knife and hand plane. Check out https://www.youtube.com/@Paul.Sellers/playlists starting with making a workbench